 Political
Corrections
with Margo Kingston
What are your core values? What is your life purpose? Where do you look for inspiration?
If you like, have a go at answering these questions before you read on, then compare your answers to those of five politicians whose job it was to convince you to support the political parties they led at the last federal election.
I read the answers of Bob Brown, Andrew Bartlett, John Anderson, Mark Latham and John Howard last week, when a friend gave me the transcript of an ABC Compass program broadcast six days before the federal election called 'What our leaders believe'. You can read the transcript at http://www.abc.net.au/compass/s1201238.htm.
Electing a leader is about trusting them, yet we never seem to get to the nub of the relationship of trust between Australians and their elected political leadership. Instead we get lost in presentation, word and blame games, jousting, self-interest and colour. And increasingly we switch allegiances on mood, or in reaction to day-to-day events and impressions. This trend was reinforced this week when a Sydney Morning Herald poll showed plummeting support for Howard and his government, recently comfortably re-elected on a 'trust us, distrust the other lot' pitch. Now Labor leads!
So who is the man we decided to trust with our collective future for another three years? Comparing the interviews, John Howard's was the least open, yet perhaps the most revealing. Doogue asked: "What values have you sought to hand onto your children?" The values of his parents, he replied, "honesty, loyalty to one's family, hard work, aspiration, a commitment to the community."
The glaring omission was compassion, a core value cited by all the others in one form or another. Compassion is "awareness of the suffering of another coupled with the wish to relieve it"; synonyms include pity, sympathy and empathy. Compassion is not a partisan value. In the words of US statesman Hubert Humphrey, "Compassion is not weakness, and concern for the unfortunate is not socialism."
By interview end, Howard had dumped honesty and commitment to community as non-core values, after Doogue was forced to press him on a question the other leaders had answered without prodding. "Is there much time for prayer or contemplation or reflection? How do you build it into the life that you live?"
"Oh look that's private," Howard replied.
"You strike me as a man who doesn't ruminate a lot?"
"...That, once again, is my business because it doesn't, it's not something to do with my public office."
"Oh isn't it?"
"Well people may be interested in it, I accept that. But I am not, you know, somebody who feels that it's part of my job to share sort of every private moment with the public, because I don't know that they're particularly interested in it."
Doogue: "I suppose it goes to the core of how a man is altered by high office, and whether your values - I would expect they would change you see."
"No, my fundamental values haven't changed. My belief in the centrality of the family, my very strong belief in private business enterprise, my very strong belief in the, I think, stabilising influence of the Judaeo-Christian ethic in this country. Those beliefs haven't changed at all."
So, we're now left with Howard's values bottom line - centrality of family, belief in private enterprise - what does he believe the role of government is? - and belief in the need for a particular religious creed for societal stability. Where is Howard the man? Why, he's not there at all.
So, we trusted a man for whom honesty and integrity is not central, who lacks empathy for others, and whose core beliefs are about the system, not how he behaves in relation to it.
Have Howard the man and Howard the politician merged? Does political advantage wholly determine what he does? Does he lack a personal belief system that informs the way he does politics? Is he, in short, a hollow man?
This would explain how he could tell Doogue that he had never had a crisis of spirit, or even pangs of regret for past mistakes.
Doogue: "So you can absolutely in your own mind lie happily in bed at night with your own conscience?"
Howard: "I am an extremely good sleeper."
That's easy, of course, if what suits you politically is the same as the demands of your conscience. Doogue asked whether Howard had "reflected on or been troubled by the fact (that) the worst claims imaginable were made that those children threw their children overboard are now clearly wrong? Have you thought of speaking to any of them or making a public statement acknowledging that that was a slur and it was wrong?"
"No I haven't, because it was made at the time in good faith...."
Think about that for a moment. You are told that a friend has stolen from a neighbour. You accuse him, he protests his innocence, and you later learn that your information was false. Can you imagine NOT saying sorry? Your good faith is irrelevant to the unjustified hurt you've caused another. You take responsibility for your mistake, human being to human being. And you empathise, knowing how you would feel in his circumstances. You apologise.
Howard's reaction is eerily inhuman. It doesn't suit him politically to apologise. There is no inner voice competing with his political one for attention, and he is incapable of empathy because he's lost his soul to politics.
Such a man is bound to corrode the values upon which our democracy, and our society, is based. It's inevitable. How did we come to trust such a man to represent the public interest? Is the Liberal Party to blame for making him leader? The media for not exposing him? The people for not seeing through him or for not caring enough to try to? Most importantly, will we learn lessons from our misjudgment to minimise the chance of it happening again?
Here's a lesson I hope the media learns. Get less distracted by the day-to-day detritus of politics and focus on core values all the time when interviewing our 'leaders'. Always make the link between values and policies. And don't ask questions until you've examined your own values and commit yourself to strive to live by them. The personal integrity of Doogue underpinned the best political interviews of 2004. That no one else asked these questions, and that the answers received virtually no publicity, exposes the barren charade that passes for public discourse in Australia.
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